From Keyboard to Cloud: How one client increased efficiency and reduced costs by leveraging a full-stack strategy with AiNET

The Problem:

When the client first reached out to AiNET, their problem was a familiar one: their IT department wasn’t supporting their mission.

This is a common story. This IT department was built like so many others: Hundreds of employees from different contracts, a patchwork of best-in-class technology “solutions” provided by multiple vendors, supplied along different delivery timelines, made the IT department anything but efficient and effective. This impacted the mission and led to dissatisfaction for employees, customers and stakeholders.

The symptoms of these problems:

Chronic downtime of critical systems.

Huge delays implementing new systems

Cost Overruns

Senior leadership distraction with IT problems

This lead to impacts business-wide:

Technologies that the business required were delayed by years.

Employees couldn’t rely on IT for completion of their critical projects.

Executives were not able to focus on their core business and core objectives.

The IT problem was further compounded by scale. The client has annual budget of less than $10B. The IT department spends hundreds of millions of dollars on multi-year programs. They have thousands of employees, millions of customers, and dozens of departments – each with its own IT requirements.

Obstacles ranged from:

24/7 Life Safety requirements

Personally Identifiable Information (PII)

Financial data security

HIPAA compliance

Stringent Chain of Custody

Complex Audit requirements

These obstacles were compounded by the need for scalable growth – without interrupting services.

Our client’s highly talented CIO was overwhelmed trying to integrate new requirements onto legacy systems with shrinking budgets. Leadership looked for new approaches to solve their problems in place.

Upon engaging AiNET, the client saw a new possibility to do business: a system he could own from the ground up, managed by a single strategic partner. Though he met with multiple vendors, their offerings would have simply added to the complexity of the existing IT patchwork – more puzzle pieces of technology, more support contracts — more headaches.

Only AiNET had the comprehensive skills, capabilities and most importantly, vision, to bring a high level concept of IT — responsive to the business — with metrics based on outcomes and experiences not technology components.

The client understood that the root problem was simple: no single department owned the IT systems and solutions that were essential to accomplishing the business’s mission. Multiple vendors meant fingers pointing at each other, not at answers. Systems didn’t talk to one another. No one knew when the last real disaster test had occurred. No vendor had a firm understanding of whole IT architecture. The organization is large and complex… but its IT didn’t have to be.

A simple principle…

A simple principle designed and implemented by AiNET, focused around the business’s needs:

Predictable: systems will be up

Responsible: systems will respond quickly and consistently.

Scalable: Timely implementation and support of new technologies.

… and of course, the systems and technologies to achieve it.

AiNET responded with our proven methodology – we listened to the client, and truly got to know their business needs and processes. By implementing the core infrastructure to support them, each application and system was able to be integrated in an orderly fashion. This timeline was developed with client stakeholders in coordination with department heads and then systematically implemented by AiNET.

AiNET’s Resolution
Using AiNET’s methodology and full suite of technologies, the client was able to take the 30,000 foot view of its IT systems. AiNET implemented technologies across the entire spectrum of their IT infrastructure.

Keyboard to the cloud:

Project and Engineering Management

Software Development

Off-site disaster recovery planning, preparation and management

Data backup and retention

Outside/inside fiber construction and engineering

Mainframe operations

Managed services

Structured cabling

Data center Consolidation

Cloud

Audit & Compliance support

Helpdesk

AiNET provided a strategic framework and vision for how to meet all of the business requirements while positively impacting it.

Employee productivity went up.

IT support costs dropped.

Helpdesk calls went down.

Reduction in number of IT contracts.

The Result
By consolidating with a single strategic partner, the client has been able to improve service to his hundreds of thousands of constituents, has seen measurable reductions to over-all costs, and dramatically increased efficiencies across all departments. Continuing services prevent and reduce technology “creep” and cost inflation with unnecessary systems and services.

Most important, IT had become a complementary facet of their business; NOT a challenge to be overcome. With the huge amounts of time freed up for senior leadership by no longer having to worry about their IT systems, it allowed them to get back to focusing on their core business and providing excellent services to their clients.